Singapore Hawker Centres - Exploratory Data Analysis

Data Cleaning

Doing a quick search on Holland Village, it seems that the history of neighborhood goes back to the 1930s and 1940s, so I will tentatively estimate the year_opened to be 1935

Mapping Singapore's Hawker Centres

We will use Plotly Express to create the visuals for our EDA. For the scatterplot map we create, you will need a free Mapbox token. Details on how to attain the Mapbox token and further Mapbox Plotly documentation can be found at the link below.

With the low variance in color, and based on the scale of the color legend, it looks like there isn't much variance in the number of reviews and most hawker centres have thousands of reviews. Let's look at the distribution of reviews.

Distribution of the Number of Reviews

The data is fairly right skewed, as half of the hawker centres have more than 1,900 reviews, with a few outliers having well over 10,000 reviews.

Distribution of Ratings

Given that ratings can only range from 0 to 5, it's not surprising to see a normal distribution with a narrow range of values. The lowest rating is 3.7, while the top rating is 4.4, which shows that you really can't go too wrong with any hawker centre.

When were Singapore's Hawker Centres Opened?

What % of hawker centres pre-date Singapore's independence?

Singapore became an independent country after officially separating from Malaysia in 1965. Let's create a column indicating whether the hawker centre was opened before or after independence.

93% of Singapore's current existing hawker centres were built post-independence, with almost half of them being built within 15 years of independence.

What % of hawker centres are also markets?

In Singapore, there are two types of hawker centres: the traditional hawker centre that sells cooked food, and the hawker centre market, which has stalls that sell cooked food and other market stalls that sell produce and other non-cooked foods. Produce and meats tend to be cheaper at these markets than regular supermarkets, making these market hawker centres an attractive one-stop shop.

Are newer hawker centres being built as traditional hawker centres, or are market hawker centres still being built?

To answer this, we can modify the histogram from above to color the bars by hawker type

Interesting to see that all but one of the centres opened since 2010 are traditional hawker centres with no market attached. I would be curious to know whether health/hygiene concerns over these markets factors into the decline in new market hawker centres being opened.